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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts. STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture.

Yes, absolutely. And the only reason I'm doing that is because the current culture warriors rampaging through universities and science funding are doing the same.

I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs. All undergrads stay at the current universities, where only "teaching professors" remain. Even in STEM, most undergrad classes don't benefit greatly from having an active researcher teaching them - but graduate level classes do.

I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.

I kind of disagree. There's a lot of small stuff happening behind the scenes at universities and then silently creeping into products all over the world. There's two relatively recent prices for lasers, those came from "classic-size" groups. Advances here (independent from those prizes) also still frequently make it from universities into (e.g. telecom) products. In biochem, CRISPR/CAS9 was an incredibly small team. In material science, I expect small university groups making big contributions to high-entropy metal alloys and to further improvement of semiconductors.

I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs.

I don't see how you can avoid ideological capture by making research explicitly part of the government. That's just begging for ideological (specifically, political) capture.

Are the current national labs "part of the government" in any meaningful way?

In that they are literally a part of the US Department of Energy (a.k.a US Department of Energy and Nukes), yes.

I mean, sure. And the Marines are part of the DoD. Does that facilitate ideological capture, especially one that differs between administrations?

My personal experience in both cases says no, not really. The government can't significantly change the ideological makeup of either the national labs or the Marines, and both are ideologically not significantly different than the median of the population.

The government has already changed the ideological makeup of the military. Trump and Hegseth are currently attempting to change it in another way.

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